


Carry It Past Goodbye

by the_rck



Category: Weiß Kreuz
Genre: Angst, Canonical Character Death, F/M, Not A Fix-It, Not a romance, References to Underage, Time Travel
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-10-26
Updated: 2017-10-26
Packaged: 2019-01-23 07:27:19
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,535
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12502056
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/the_rck/pseuds/the_rck
Summary: Because Yohji had only the vaguest idea of what he was doing, it took them five jumps to get close to the right time. Yohji was all set to try again, but Asuka overruled him. "Four years early," she said, "isn't so bad. We'll need that time to prepare."





	Carry It Past Goodbye

**Author's Note:**

> Title from "Sonnet w/ Rose" by Matthew Yeager.
> 
> Thanks to Nakki no Miko beta reading.
> 
> For the purposes of this story, I'm assuming that Asuka is a few years older than Yohji. The underage reference is to them having sex when he's seventeen or eighteen and she's twenty two or twenty three. (Time travel kind of mucks up keeping exact track of one's age since the next birthday may not actually fall 365 days after the previous one.)

Because Yohji had only the vaguest idea of what he was doing, it took them five jumps to get close to the right time. Yohji was all set to try again, but Asuka overruled him. "Four years early," she said, "isn't so bad. We'll need that time to prepare."

Yohji didn't argue. He knew he was only there because Asuka knew less than he did about the time machine. _If she could operate it, she'd have left me for the enforcers._ He tried not to think about his mother or the rest of those they'd left behind. _If this works, they won't die._

Yohji knew it really ought to have been his mother who made the trip with Asuka. She had designed the device and knew how it was supposed to work, but as they'd heard screams and gunshots from elsewhere in the building, she'd handed the device to Yohji and shoved him toward Asuka. "Go! We'll buy you as much time as we can!" She gestured to her assistants. "Pile anything that can be moved in front of the door!"

They arrived with very little. Asuka had only just begun gathering supplies when the enforcers had found them. She'd managed to bring a little food, the encyclopedia, and Yohji's mother's jewelry. The jewelry wasn't much, but Yohji's mother had stripped it off as she urged them to go.

****

When he was much older, Yohji wondered why Asuka had been selected for the time travel mission. All he could come up with was the likelihood that there simply hadn’t been any better candidates. Asuka was intelligent, cunning, and athletic-- and completely unable to forego the regular doses of adrenaline that came with risking her life.

That last, Yohji realized, many years after the fact, should have disqualified her because anyone with even basic sense would have realized that the odds of her getting herself killed were considerably higher than the odds of her completing her mission.

But Yohji was fifteen when they arrived in twentieth century Tokyo. He thought Asuka, who was twenty, could walk on water and that everything she asked of herself-- and of him-- was aimed at altering the timeline. That he couldn’t figure out how that would work, just based on studying the encyclopedia, couldn’t possibly mean that she was wrong, not when she was the only hope he had. The only hope anyone had.

Becoming private investigators made some sense, even in retrospect, but only if that had meant sticking to the sordid and nonviolent sorts of jobs that would support them, let them set their own schedules, travel without much explanation, and not make anyone look at their credentials too closely. It was certainly less risky, less limiting, than becoming criminals which was the other easy option.

Asuka managed to work Yohji’s mother’s jewelry into enough money to get by, first by betting and then by investing. Betting was faster, and Asuka enjoyed it more, but investing meant having a stream of legal income. More than once, Asuka grumbled about the fact that they never managed to gather enough money for bribes or for the simpler forms power that came with wealth. “I was supposed to have that,” she said more than once.

Yohji believed her. Even years later, he believed her. Sending her back to change things made more sense if she had resources for it, and money was pretty damned basic.

Living in an apartment that didn’t reek, where the paint didn’t peel, would have been really nice, too. About the only good thing Yohji could think of about how they’d lived early on was that it eroded his hero worship pretty damned quick.

It just hadn’t done anything at all to make him less horny or to decrease his crush. When Asuka finally declared him legal and started fucking him, teenage Yohji rejoiced, but it was another thing that the older, more cynical Yohji put on the list of reasons Asuka should never have been sent into the past. The kindest interpretation he could put on it was that she thought he’d need to seduce someone-- maybe more than one someone-- in order to complete the mission and wanted to teach him how.

But he was pretty sure that it had simply been an easy way to control him, to keep him with her. He was the only person who knew why she was there, who she really was, and the horrors the unaltered future held.

He supposed it never occurred to her that that last would have been enough to hold him.

****

They never should have gone near the Riot case. To be fair, they both assumed that the missing girl had eloped with an unsuitable boyfriend-- or possibly girlfriend-- without the family knowing. That was a bread and butter sort of job for them, not something Asuka enjoyed, but something Yohji had learned to do well.

Asuka only started showing interest in the case when the connection to Riot came up. She got the look in her eyes that Yohji was now old enough to recognize as reckless thrill seeking. He just wasn’t old enough to pull her back and tell her no. Very likely, if things hadn’t gone completely pear shaped, he never would have gotten there.

Yohji at twenty could never have made the choices that Yohji made at twenty two. Kritiker was part of that, but mostly it was the years without Asuka.

It was during that case, however, that Asuka mentioned the Takatori family. Most of what Yohji knew of the details of her mission came from casual comments, references to people and events that Yohji didn’t recognize and couldn’t find much about in the encyclopedia. Later, those scraps were all he had to lead him on what had become his mission. The Takatori, though, there actually was a lot about them in the encyclopedia. Yohji just didn’t know which bits mattered.

It had been his ignorance of the mission details, combined with his certainty that he was bleeding to death, that made Yohji urge Asuka to leave him behind, to run and save her life. If she died, everyone they’d left in the future died, too. Again. With no hope of better.

Seeing Asuka gunned down hurt as much as remembering his mother’s grim expression as she went to barricade the door. It hurt even more later, when he woke and realized that he might live. He would have to manage the mission without even knowing what it was.

****

Seeing Asuka’s face through Neu’s cracked visor had given Yohji hope. Not, as his teammates thought, because he loved her but because the information he needed must certainly still be in her head. Because, if he could bring her back to herself, he wouldn’t be alone in his knowledge of the future, not any more. He didn’t know whether the timeline had changed or what he might still do to alter it. The encyclopedia had gradually slowed and darkened and stopped working about a year after Yohji joined Kritiker, and he had no idea how to revive it.

Had the Takatoris been the problem? If so, was Omi still a danger? Could Yohji save him-- or kill him-- if he was? He was nearly certain that Takatori Mamoru hadn’t even been a footnote in what he’d read, what he’d tried to memorize and to transcribe.

Schreient acting as it did made Yohji wonder if Masafumi-- who he was certain had been a major problem-- had somehow survived. He remembered whispers about the dead rising, but his mother had insisted that those rumors couldn’t possibly be true. The dead, she said, were dead. No science existed that could animate them.

But she’d have said that Masafumi’s monsters and his shapechange were impossible, too. Yohji’d actually seen those. He’d read Kritiker’s files on the subject, too. Kritiker’s security on such things was laughable next to what his mother had done to keep him out of her files.

So he knew that Masafumi’s body was missing.

Asuka in Schreient must mean that she was undercover. Yohji couldn’t let himself believe otherwise, not even when it became clear that she didn’t remember him. Even without her memories, the boy he had been was certain that she wouldn’t have, couldn’t have, forgotten the mission. The man he was doubted and hoped in equal parts and made no effort to stop the boy from trying to reach her.

Yohji had known for years that his broken best wasn’t going to repair the future. Seeing Asuka again was a blinding, glorious moment of hope.

Which shattered when he finally admitted that Asuka was gone, that all that was left was Neu. Killing her destroyed any chance he might have had of remaking the world the way that his mother and her colleagues had wanted, but what else could he do? She loved Masafumi. In order to kill him, Yohji would have to kill her, and Masafumi had to die and stay dead.

Yohji wouldn’t be born for another hundred and fifty years. He’d never know if he’d done enough.

His heart broke when he strangled the only person living who might have been able to tell him.


End file.
